In the bicycle industry, there is always a need to produce strong but lightweight components. Any weight reductions of the bicycle lower the amount of energy expended by the bicyclist. Even small reductions in weight can be all the difference between winning and losing. Modern composite materials, such as carbon fiber materials, have been widely used on a variety of components of bicycles due to their high strength and low weight properties. However, carbon fiber materials still have a number of drawbacks that make them undesirable for certain components in bicycles. For instance, carbon fiber is relatively weak under compressive loads and can delaminate under repeated stress commonly experienced in wheel hubs. Moreover, minor fractures can grow and propagate so as to lead to catastrophic failure of carbon fiber components. Typically, since the wheel hub experiences significant mechanical stress, the wheel hub for bicycle wheels is made of a light metal alloy, such as an aluminum alloy, to avoid any catastrophic failures associated with carbon fiber materials. Nevertheless, wheel hubs made of carbon fiber materials have been proposed, such as in U.S. Pat. No. 7,484,812 to Meggiolan and US Patent Application Publication Number US 2006/0145530 A1 to Damon, but these designs typically still have a number of significant drawbacks. For instance, these designs require specialized structures for attaching the spokes which in turn can make spoke replacement difficult as well as can impact ride quality. Moreover, these designs also fail to account for the dramatic torques experienced between the wheel hub and the freehub mechanism. As such, these wheel hub designs can be prone to premature catastrophic failure and are difficult to retrofit to existing cartridge designs.
Thus, there is a need for improvement in this field.